On Thu, 27 Feb 1997, Bob Nestor wrote:
> I *think* that part of the problem relates to the /etc/syslog.conf 
> settings and how you start X.  If syslog.conf directs messages to user 
> "root" and you start X manually by first loging into root, you'll get 
> messages plastered on the bottom of the physical screen and will as any 
> xterm window.  I believe I fixed this on my system by changing the 
> syslog.conf parameters. If you have your system configured to 
> automatically start X on boot, then I don't think you'll see the messages 
> on the bottom of the physical screen since there's no user "root" running 
> on that screen, but you may get them in all your windows depending on the 
> syslog.conf setup.  I don't think I was ever able to get the "-c" option 
> to work, but when I was first setting this up it was on a 1.0-ish system.

Okay, I grabbed a copy of the xconsole source from ftp.x.org and found the
problem... it's not a syslog.conf thing, since I never login as root
(NetBSD always tells me not to whenever I do ;), and that shouldn't affect
whether xconsole works or not anyways... The problem I was having was that
xconsole complained "Couldn't open console".

Anyways, xconsole checks to see if the current user owns /dev/console and
has read and write permission to it. However, this isn't necessary for
TIOCCONS to work; you just have to either be root if UCONSOLE isn't
defined, and if it is, you don't need any special permissions at all.
#ifdefing out the check makes xconsole work properly...

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